http://cargocollective.com SpaceCollective-alternate Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:55:35 +0000 http://cargocollective.com en http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/Notes-from-the-digital-diaspora http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/Notes-from-the-digital-diaspora Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:55:35 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55574 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene Besides an occasional landmark building, the cities we live in aren’t all that different from the urban settings we’ve had to contend with since the day we were born, the most conspicuous variable being that there is more of it. But for those of us who are engaged with culture as an ever-changing expression of the zeitgeist it can be frustrating to live in a time capsule that exhibits the frozen relics of an otherwise long forgotten past. The main reason for this is architecture’s inherent immutability. Once erected, a building’s walls rigidly maintain the status quo while the culture at large constantly reinvents itself. As SpaceCollective contributor Greg Lynn puts it in his book Animate Form: “More than even their traditional role of providing shelter, architects are expected to provide culture with stasis. Because of its dedication to permanence, architecture is one of the last modes of thought based on the inert.” By contrast, today’s prevalent mindset, as exemplified by the internet, is all about breaking down boundaries between established and emerging forces, pitting yesterday’s top down hierarchies against the bottom up rule of the online population, and promoting the hegemony of the immaterial over the material world. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55574/newcity.jpg" width="540" height="302" width_o="540" height_o="302" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55574/newcity_o.jpg" data-mid="236358" border="0" align="left"/> By now we’re all familiar with the successful online community Second Life and its virtual landmass exceeding the area of Greater Boston, where people are effectively leading their double lives. It won’t be long before social networks like this will be fully immersive 3D environments where players can talk to each other in real-time lip sync while consummating their online relationships via telepresence, achieved through the transmission of stimuli from one location to the next. It is interesting to realize that the standoff between digital space and the built environment were at the heart of the two most recent downturns of the economy: On the one hand the dot com bubble of the late ‘90s and on the other the mortgage crisis which recently caused the real estate market to collapse. Meanwhile, the online world is thriving. Although by no means an economist these subsequent recessions somehow struck me as being tied to a clash between the old and the new vying for dominance of a world in transition. Because of the internet every traditional institution is suddenly subject to a wholesale transformation of its historical model, from the entertainment industry’s losses due to illegal downloading of its content, the waning import of the print media and academia’s changing role in the age of the search engine, to the economy’s response to globalization facilitated by the web. Until now architecture didn’t seem much affected by the emergence of this new world order, but it becomes ever harder to deny the unmistakable symptoms of a rapidly emerging digital diaspora. As more immersive internet strategies keep presenting themselves in the form of a million different services offered by the limitless digital information space, people will continue to transcend the physical restrictions of their residences as they expand their lifestyles ever further beyond their local zip codes. From an architectural standpoint it may be somewhat depressing to realize that the real estate in Second Life, where the imagination runs free, nevertheless mostly consists of the same old ranch houses and McMansions people prefer in the outside world. However it is the reality of the built environment itself that is to blame for this state of affairs. After all, these virtual houses closely resemble the places many of us were born in and have been surrounded by for generations. This is the stasis we have lived with all our lives. Indeed, besides the occasional cultural landmark, we have little reason to assume that the world will ever look any different, be it outside our doorstep, online or in the future. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55574/2ndlife.jpg" width="540" height="292" width_o="540" height_o="292" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55574/2ndlife_o.jpg" data-mid="236357" border="0" align="left"/> If, by contrast, you were to link up the computers of every one of Greg Lynn’s colleagues and students who produced virtual buildings for years, their combined output of computer-designed architecture would provide the online community with an alluring animated city the likes of which we’ve never seen before, neither in reality nor in science-fiction films So far few architects have been inclined to settle the unruly frontier of the internet because they’re way too busy promoting their buildings in the “real” world, even though in today’s economic climate that has become a rather hopeless task. Yet some of them, like the Argentinian designer Hernan Diaz Alonso, who studied under Greg and now has his own worldwide following, would rather break into the movies than sacrifice their lives at the altar of the built environment. Greg’s own work made it into the movies after being appropriated for the production design of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. And as you can see in this video clip he made with frequent collaborator Imaginary Forces, he at least considers the potentials of what architect Rem Koolhaas once called the “(digital) “revolution that seems about to melt all that is solid.” The problem architecture faces is that today’s technologies are beginning to merge with our minds, creating levels of immersion and interaction with which physical embodiment can no longer catch up. Historically, cities may have served as magnificent aggregators of human activities, elevating rural lifestyles to unprecedented levels of sophistication, but in the age of hyper-connectivity it becomes clear that the built environment is a major contributor to its inhabitants’ relative isolation. For more than half a century this walled in condition was alleviated by one way broadcast media but it is now busted open by the digital diaspora that is increasingly effecting our contemporary existence. In this context, people invariably raise the issue that the body does not migrate into the virtual world, but, as Edward Castronova argues in his book Exodus to the Virtual World, “that is not important...where you are is where you are looking. Gaze is location." In fact there is much less of a dichotomy between artificial and actual reality than most observers of the phenomenon acknowledge. The digital infrastructure is everywhere which allows people to free up their bodies and go anywhere in the physical world while remaining connected to our online “home.” This, more than anything, may ultimately re-vitalize today’s urban landscape. Besides the familiar internet connections in coffee shops, one can imagine a new generation of virtual flâneurs. In the 19th Century a flâneur was a person who walked the city in order to experience it or to actively participate in street life, not unlike the critical explorations of the built environment the Situationists called dérives. Today’s versions of these escapades in the analog world would be enhanced by the capacity of new-style urban drifters to tap into a seamless overlay of digital connections wherever they would go, infusing physical reality with potentials and narratives that would otherwise have been obscured by the buildings’ opaque demeanor. As I put it in an earlier post in the streets we may know what lies behind the facades of every store or public building, giving us an instant impression of its tagged contents, and people will have devices, as they did in a Japanese experiment, transmitting and receiving each other’s personal profiles, alerting them to the presence of compatible others. In this ultra-serendipitous environment we will experience far more advanced forms of socializing which will infuse the world with a plethora of social and romantic opportunities that have eluded us so far. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55574/wanderer.jpg" width="270" height="344" width_o="270" height_o="344" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55574/wanderer_o.jpg" data-mid="236359" border="0" align="left"/> Ever since the 19th Century young people, who in Germany were referred to as Wandervogel (meaning migrating birds), have been seeking an alternative to the bourgeois lifestyles that had taken them hostage, which in those days often meant losing themselves in nature. However, short of literally getting lost — which is not nearly as easy in the age of satellites and GPS — today we can have the best of both worlds. Thanks to the digital diaspora geography is no longer destiny as physical distance can be negotiated from any location and the virtual realm shows ever more potential for near physical immersion. The Japanese term for Virtual Reality translates into English as Intimate Presence, which is a great way to suggest the “real time” interactions that are currently facilitated by the web. Even though this immersiveness is still hampered by a poor visual component due to the current lack of available bandwidth, the analog and digital realms continue to merge as entire generations of internet users are engaging in a frenzy of instantaneous connectivity. The more the web will become an all-encompassing immersive place, the more we will be able to live in multiple dimensions at once without ever losing touch with the extended worldwide community that will be along for the ride wherever they or we may physically reside. This marriage of virtual and actual presence will provide us with a range of visceral and mental experiences that will increasingly transcend all boundaries that restrict us today. Somewhere along this trajectory we will be ready for our impending migration into the shared mind space that is foreshadowed in so many contributions to SpaceCollective under the aegis of the Polytopia project. Indeed, it would appear that in preparation for this event we are currently in the process of rewiring our brains, optimizing our personal relationships, expanding our access to knowledge and capitalizing on our collective intelligence, all of which in a bygone era were bogged down by the noise of a vast cognitive waste that we are finally learning to overcome. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene Besides an occasional landmark building, the cities we live in aren’t all that different from the urban settings we’ve... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/Space-is-the-place http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/Space-is-the-place Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:16:17 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55583 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/2001ship.jpg" width="186" height="186" width_o="186" height_o="186" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/2001ship_o.jpg" data-mid="236450" border="0" align="left"/>"Space is the place," Jazz musician Sun Ra famously proclaimed while adorning himself like the Sun God Ra as he conducted his musical rituals in the communal living space he shared with his band and following in the heart of Philadelphia. Space is the imaginary place in which some of the world’s most successful entertainment franchises, like Star Wars and Star Trek take place, establishing vast communities of intensely loyal fans in the process. Space is the void where the faithful of different cultures and religions hope to one day find salvation behind the pearly gates of a heavenly kingdom, in paradise, or in the Otherworld where according to Welsh mythology the departed souls reside. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/astrology.jpg" width="231" height="180" width_o="231" height_o="180" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/astrology_o.jpg" data-mid="236453" border="0" align="left"/>The world’s great churches with their skywards-reaching ceilings are designed as containers of holy space where godliness holds the flock in its inspirational embrace from above. Space is where the world’s first astronomers discovered the constellations that may define our astrological character traits while greatly influencing the fate of our earthly existence. Space also figures prominently in the mythology underlying the controversial religion of Scientology which holds that our past lives on other planets continue to be a source of negative influences on the mind and spirit in the present. Many scientists agree that space is where we come from. Indeed, as charismatic astronomer Carl Sagan would famously phrase it, there’s a good chance that we are actually “made of starstuff,” and, given our avid space exploration, we appear to be destined to return there one day. Space is the distance humans traversed to experience their first awe-struck glimpse of the pale blue dot on which we live. This prompted visionary architect Buckminster Fuller to coin the endearing term “Spaceship Earth” as he looked at our orbiting planet with great concern because then, as now, we were threatening to blow it to smithereens. Space is an ever shrinking commodity on Earth, where only the rich can afford a sizable piece of it while the poor are forever pushed towards the outskirts, locked out of paradise once again. To be a one planet species has often been considered a great liability for the human race, and NASA’s back-up plan to expand our human presence in space comes down to the simple directive, “We’re out of here!” <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/SP-413cover.jpg" width="200" height="259" width_o="200" height_o="259" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/SP-413cover_o.jpg" data-mid="236454" border="0" align="left"/>The era’s push for space migration was informed by Gerard O’Neill’s book The High Frontier in which the author proposes to build space colonies, orbiting between he earth and the moon, where the inhabitants might avoid some of the mistakes made on the besieged mother planet as they would start over with a clean slate. In space some people suspect evil to lurk in alien worlds, while others are speculating on a Higher Intelligence that may one day illuminate us, unless these extraterrestrials would treat us with the same lack of respect we afford other species who we consider to be lower ranking life forms. Indeed, some humans take their arrogance so far as to believe that we are the only intelligent species in an otherwise infinitely vast realm of empty space. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/stapledon-star-maker.jpg" width="200" height="138" width_o="200" height_o="138" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55583/stapledon-star-maker_o.jpg" data-mid="236456" border="0" align="left"/>Space is a mindset, ranging from the “spacey” mental states of a drug-addled brain to the sheer exaltation of transcendental minds like William Blake who observed infinity in a grain of sand; not to mention the turned on mind explorers of the ‘60s who expanded their minds to the furthest reaches of consciousness from where they reported back that “we are all one” and “everything is connected.” Between inner and outer space now lies a third realm which, for lack of a better word, we are calling cyberspace. This vast tangle of technology spans the globe like an invisible web that will eventually encompass all of us. Although there is no vantage point from where we can look at it, the fact that it is indeed a space can be measured by its potential to replace massive amounts of the “real” world with a virtual realm where we will be conducting an ever larger part of our lives in pursuit of new mythologies. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene \"Space is the place,\" Jazz musician Sun Ra famously proclaimed while adorning himself like the Sun God Ra as he conducted... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/FOR-REFERENCE-ONLY http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/FOR-REFERENCE-ONLY Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:03:58 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55577 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle8.jpg" width="250" height="250" width_o="250" height_o="250" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle8_o.jpg" data-mid="236393" border="0" align="left"/> Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary. These words by genius Argentinian author and ex-librarian Jorge Luis Borges are close to my heart. Most people I know love books but my feelings about them are somewhat more ambivalent. For years I used to have a phobia for libraries that had less to do with my early anti-intellectual tendencies than with the institutional smell of musty ideas. Over time I became more appreciative of the knowledge and inspiration that could be derived from the occasional book, but more often than not I resisted reading every word between its covers. Only every once in a while did I hang on to every phrase in an attempt to postpone reaching the last page, unwilling to be faced with the emptiness that would await me in the absence of its fiction. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/smlxl.jpg" width="181" height="210" width_o="181" height_o="210" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/smlxl_o.jpg" data-mid="236394" border="0" align="left"/>Today, I’m much too vested in non-linearity, interactivity and immersive media to pay much attention to novels, and when I’m reading non-fiction books I often limit myself to the introduction and the end, while skimming through the content in between. Nevertheless I am surrounded by people who are writing and publishing their work in hefty volumes which may take up as much shelf-space as the Bible. I also have friends who are avid collectors of autographed first editions and others who are promoting beautifully crafted hand-made books, some of which can be seen on SpaceCollective (here and here). But to me books are rapidly becoming precious artifacts from an era that is about to pass. Recently I visited the public library in Seattle, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas who loves the print media and is the author of some of the above mentioned hefty tomes. His impressive building is an enticing sanctuary for the book, inspiring its visitors with an almost ecstatic optimism about a culture worth saving. The sense of exhilaration evoked by the architecture makes one look at the books as treasured objects for the ages. However the sense of euphoria lessened when it dawned on me how few people visited the library’s spiraling book stacks. Many more of them were frequenting the endless rows of computers, furnished by the city’s corporate giant Microsoft. Meanwhile the majority of visitors were sitting idle in the community spaces, neither reading nor surfing the web but simply getting through the day. The building’s most successful function, it turns out, is that of a public shelter for the homeless. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle5.jpg" width="540" height="304" width_o="540" height_o="304" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle5_o.jpg" data-mid="236398" border="0" align="left"/> The same is true for other public libraries all across America, but in the context of this celebrated building it is particularly poignant. It is as if some of the architect’s genuine respect for the book is extended to the lives of the many aimless drifters who are filing in every day during opening hours. Like the books that are patiently waiting for someone to take them off the shelves, the lost souls are lounging day in and day out on the stylish Vitra furniture hoping for a better day. They are the disenfranchised counterparts of the wistful library visitors in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, a cathedral filled with books and the thoughts of readers. But rather than being a nostalgic place full of people stuck in a luxurious waiting room, Koolhaas’ library appears to be in a strange sort of suspension waiting to be delivered into a future that seems to be taking shape all around its occupants. This effect is greatly enhanced by the glass structure’s panoramic view of cloud formations drifting over Seattle as if in time lapse. Everything here seems to be temporarily on hold in an otherwise proactive environment that is ready to respond to whatever may come. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle6.jpg" width="540" height="405" width_o="540" height_o="405" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle6_o.jpg" data-mid="236407" border="0" align="left"/> As it happens, it takes very little effort to discern the writing on the wall in the most literal way. On LCD screens mounted above the Help Desk a data visualization by George Legrady shows items being checked out at a remarkably slow pace, revealing an unexpected amount of titles that would be deemed utterly redundant by most educated people. Looking around the library the average demographic of its users turns out to be middle aged. In fact, in a city of half a million people, a paltry 1000 items per month are taken home out by teenagers, primarily checking out CD’s and DVD’s. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle4.jpg" width="540" height="304" width_o="540" height_o="304" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle4_o.jpg" data-mid="236418" border="0" align="left"/> In my post SpaceCollective’s Grand Narrative I mentioned that all the world’s books gathered in the digital domain will take up no more than 26 terabyes of disc space which can be contained on a bookshelf barely big enough to hold all 32 volumes that make up the Encyclopedia Britannica. By contrast, online competitor Wikipedia, whose content was generated in just a few years, contains 1 billion more words and can be accessed anytime and anywhere from a database stored on invisible servers. And despite being a paean to printed culture, the stacks of Seattle’s library hold only 780.000 books, all of which can be easily contained on an external hard drive that you can find on sale right now for $399 at your local department store. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle1.jpg" width="540" height="380" width_o="540" height_o="380" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle1_o.jpg" data-mid="236425" border="0" align="left"/> In fact, future readers won’t even need a hard drive to bring the entire library into their home, where the online books will be infinitely more accessible than the originals which can neither be searched nor bookmarked, and not even quoted without retyping the text. Currently a book’s foot notes only serve as instructions for scholarly research, as opposed to the links in digital publications which will bring old texts further to life. Not to speak of the digitization of important literary archives that are now buried in the dark basements of universities, accessible only to the most diligent of researchers. The truth is that once the books are digitally available an entire universe will open up around each and every one of them as its contents are let loose on the world, which will be a milestone of the same order as the emergence of the printing press, which initially made books available to the masses. People often jump to the conclusion that digital technology threatens to bring about the end of books, but the opposite is bound to be true, as may be demonstrated by the Total Library project that is being launched on SpaceCollective. Obvious goes as far as to suggest that as “mass produced information slowly moves from the printed page to the computer screen, to hand-held digital-ink devices, so the value of the printed word will transmogrify.” There can be no doubt that in the digital age the significance of the books’ contents will more than ever live up to Obvious’ claim that they will once again become “equivalent with the contents of consciousness.” But to what extent this exalted status will be passed on to the actual printed book remains to be seen. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle7.jpg" width="540" height="304" width_o="540" height_o="304" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55577/seattle7_o.jpg" data-mid="236433" border="0" align="left"/> At the very minimum we can rest assured that the stacks of Seattle’s library will remain the dedicated home to numerous bound editions which, like wizened elders, have been taken out of circulation, while being endowed with the highest status a library book can attain, clearly marked on their withered bindings: FOR REFERENCE ONLY. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/The-Search-for-Polytopia http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/The-Search-for-Polytopia Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:46:36 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55576 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene When we launched SpaceCollective towards the end of 2007 we had no idea whether the “forward thinking terrestrials’’ we were hoping to attract were actually out there. All we had to go by was our sense of the zeitgeist and the hypothesis that we are currently living through a period of exponential change that has the potential to transform human nature, using as our reigning metaphors the networked intelligence of the web, technology-induced evolution and the new space age. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55576/nodeGardenPRNB.jpg" width="540" height="402" width_o="540" height_o="402" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55576/nodeGardenPRNB_o.jpg" data-mid="236375" border="0" align="left"/> Image from Node Garden by Jared Tarbell, 2004 While students at UCLA in Los Angeles and Vienna’s School for the Applied Arts were in the early process of beta testing the site, scores of aspiring members somehow found our unpublicized URL and were applying for membership to our yet to be launched invite only community. Without any publicity or public beta, an instant network of forward thinkers from all over the world had spontaneously sprung into existence. Since then SpaceCollective has become a veritable think tank about the future hosting thousands of highly astute contributors and hundreds of thousands of page views per month. The community we established appears to be filling a gap in the culture, which relegates almost everything that lies in the future to the realm of science-fiction. Our ongoing involvement with major universities made it clear that the academic environment, which routinely passes on the wisdom of the ages, offers no formal curriculum that addresses the future. The same can be said about other institutions like the government and even the Internet itself, which offers few opportunities for future-oriented discourse. The consensus appears to be that the future is based on conjecture rather than empirical observation and therefore has little or no relevance to academia or the general populace. As a result, the precious preserve of the past is left in the respectable hands of tenured professors, while most known futurists are outsiders making a living as fiction writers (i.e. Neal Stephenson), musicians (Brian Eno), journalists (Joel Garreau) or inventors (Ray Kurzweil). SpaceCollective appears to be a similar ragtag group of individuals, coming from various creative backgrounds and sharing the interests and concerns of these avowed futurists. Unlike the majority of people whose lives tend to be rooted in the past, and the more blessed among them who manage to exist in the here and now, these forward thinkers appear to be living on the threshold of the imminent future. Not because of their superior intelligence, but because of their intuitive capacities. Where others experience the world in terms of the fixed and the firm, they see reality as a scrim revealing the future potential of things. Although this mindset may offer some people the advantage of a certain foresight, it also puts them at odds with the establishment, whose job it is to preserve the status quo rather than promote potential. Thus, in order to exercise their autonomy of thought, it makes perfect sense for them to retreat beyond the scrim to the parallel universe of the internet to dream up new strategies for transcending the stagnant world at large. “In the future, the importance of geography will be matched by the importance of values and ideas,” writes Alan Smith in a recent SpaceCollective post about a foreseeable Nationhood made up of “overlapping islands of thought.” meganmay brings his point home by observing that “more than any other website, SpaceCollective is where minds meet outside of bodies.” <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55576/values_closeup.jpg" width="540" height="391" width_o="540" height_o="391" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55576/values_closeup_o.jpg" data-mid="236376" border="0" align="left"/> Image from Nationhood: The future of Nationalism by Alan Smith In what seems to be like an update to virtual reality, which transports simulated “bodies” to alternate worlds, many internet users share the familiar sense of extending their minds into a virtual head space which they collectively inhabit. This sensibility is articulated in a couple of video Epiphanies by Richard and Xárene who call this online space “home,” while the most commented upon post, Proposal for a New Society, features several manifestoes for an online state called InterNation. Both of these notions were recently expounded in separate posts by one of the site’s most prolific futurists, Wildcat, who tackles the concept of an interactive home for what is becoming a society of mind with unprecedented clarity: “The infoverse is where we will live. And we need a home. A mutually supportive habitat of sorts. A mind habitat, an infotat for our minds, for we are infonauts.” He goes on to wonder whether “the little corner in the vast infoverse” we’ve come to know as SpaceCollective may be the home he has been looking for. Over time an unspoken consensus about the nature of Wildcat’s “mind habitat” has taken shape in several extensive posts by SpaceCollective members. For example, in “My cranium is open source?” versatile futurist philosopher Spaceweaver writes that "in the future the very definition of individuality will probably be derived not from the arbitrary conditions of one’s biological makeup, but rather how one is connected and to what. The degree of individuation will depend on (the) difference in interconnectivity.” In conclusion he observes that “becoming interconnected minds who share all resources (i.e. computation power and bandwidth) might become an increasingly attractive existential option.” Following up his post about a “mutually supportive mind habitat,” Wildcat has a go at the unresolved Proposal for a New Society and takes a leap forward by drawing up an ad hoc constitution while coining a brilliant catch-all name for his project. Here’s an excerpt of the thought process that brought him to this point: “My aim in this proposition is to emphasize that the concepts of Utopia and Dystopia are anachronistic, outdated and outright obsolete. In their stead I shall try and propose a fresh perspective on the notion of the future of humanity, a natural humanity, perpetually evolving. The future of humanity I propose is one of Polytopia, a term designating an open ended and emergent process of co-evolution and cross-fertilization considering all and any conscious aware entities.” The word Polytopia is a derivation of the Latin terms Poly (many) and -topia (places, or states of mind), which according to one of Wildcat’s definitions suggests “an open source collaboration between consciously aware entities towards an increase in combined interactive intelligence.” There have been many attempts by the collective to infuse shopworn words with new meaning for purposes of future discourse. Al advocated an online dictionary for “new words and new understandings of old ones,” while Obvious proposed “hyper-textual mind maps" as a representation of his thoughts”, and Spaceweaver maintained that “metaphors are the landmarks of the evolution of language.” In an earlier post Wildcat himself announced that “the emergence of a new language, is nothing less than the emergence of a new human being. These two must come together.” So he kept struggling to coin new words for the different conditions he has been trying to articulate. At one point he defined the inter-connective mind as the ColleX which among other things is meant to be “a descriptive term designating the fundamental emergent direction of a group of sentient beings.” But despite the usefulness of its meaning, the word apparently lacked the required ring to enter into SpaceCollective’s consciousness. Until further notice the same may have happened to his “Transbeing” (to replace Transhumanist) or to Al’s coinage of the “Internation.” Yet occasionally someone happens upon a phrase that has the potential to establish a new paradigm, like Jung’s Collective Unconscious, William Gibson’s Cyberspace or Vernor Vinge’s Singularity. And as far as I’m concerned Wildcat’s Polytopia should go down in history as just such a term because it so well describes the inter-connected future we are pursuing in this little corner of the vast infoverse. I am a Polytopian. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene When we launched SpaceCollective towards the end of 2007 we had no idea whether the “forward thinking terrestrials’’... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/New-Concepts-of-Self http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/New-Concepts-of-Self Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:06:18 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55550 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene In our upcoming film The Terrestrials, made by a cast and crew of SpaceCollective members and dealing with, among many other things, the evolution of intelligence, the controversial ‘60s promoter of mind expansion, Dr. Timothy Leary, does a stand-up comedy routine which he calls a commercial for the brain: Now this moment I must stop for a commercial from my sponsor…and your sponsor: the human brain. You’re carrying around a perfect instrument. This instrument is designed to create any reality that you can wire it up to create. The brain is perfect. It’s that program that screws it up. The programs that they lay on us. I’ll tell you what the brain wants, the brains wants to be excited. To be surprised. Electrified. Your brain wants you to take your brain everywhere. Your brain doesn’t want to be stuck in cities all its life. Your brain wants to do it all and see it all. Your brain wants you to go all the way - wouldn’t you if you were a brain? And to continually show your brain that same old dumb soap opera…here’s what your brain is gonna do. It’s gonna turn you off. The brain wants to…evolve! That’s the end of the commercial. How about a round of applause for the brain! (Applause) You’ll notice that Leary’s routine centers around the dynamic between our brain and ourselves as separate entities, illustrating that we are a body, a mind and a person working together to maintain the illusion that the head contains a person: a Self. Technically, however, in the space behind our face is nothing but material substance; flesh, blood, bone and the “grey matter” that is the brain, which through interaction with the physical and social world manages to create a “mind.” <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55550/family_senseofself_small.jpg" width="540" height="461" width_o="540" height_o="461" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55550/family_senseofself_small_o.jpg" data-mid="236307" border="0" align="left"/> In his post “Mind – The need for a new model,” Spaceweaver calls for an updated theory of mind: Theories of mind held by individuals arise at a very early age as a consequence of interactions with the environment. They can be fairly simple or incredibly complex depending on factors such as the individual’s mental and emotional capacity, upbringing, education, life experience and cultural background. He goes on to suggest that in the face of modern civilization’s “massive transformative pressures, a revision of the prevailing theory of mind, the very manner by which we perceive reality and ourselves, seems to become imperative.” From its inception we have endeavored various initiatives to create new paradigms on Space Collective, including inquiries into a New Society, a New Language, PR campaigns for the Future, the collective Polytopian Mind Space coined by Wildcat, all of which have since been perused by millions of visitors to the site. It is hard to gauge how influential all of this has been, but the work that is being done here has received numerous stellar reviews in the online community and has far exceeded our initial expectations. Yet futurists are by nature impatient and anxiously looking for evidence that the potentials they perceive will eventually come to some kind of fruition. Laymen like us derive great hope from the scientific progress that is tracked on blogs like K21st (and republished here via Wildcards), but between the discovery of DNA in the early ’50s to the completion of the first human genome in 2003 still lies a lag time of half a century. Therefor it is both disheartening and encouraging that so many of the thinkers and the concepts that are regularly referred to by this community go back to the sixties. They are the likes of Gregory Bateson mentioned in Spaceweaver’s forementioned post, the above quoted Timothy Leary (who is a recurring presence in The Singularity is Near and is reinvented for today’s audiences in The Terrestrials), Nano-technology, Kurzweil’s coveted Moore’s Law, Transhumanism, etc. All of these serve as milestones to measure our progress (and admittedly in every single case advances have been made), but sometimes one can understand why such great thinkers of the ‘60s as Brian Eno and Stewart Brand (the one time employer of maverick futurist Kevin Kelly) have established their Long Now Foundation for long-term thinking. In light of the above, it is reassuring that ‘60s media philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s premonition of a then non-existent internet has since changed the world beyond his wildest expectations. His concept of a global village is all pervasive in today’s online world and his other oft-quoted insight – the medium is the message – may provide a useful model for the yet to be realized Polytopia project. McLuhan famously proposes that media itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. According to a Wikipedia entry on the subject, “a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. This concentration on the medium and how it conveys information — rather than on the specific content of the information — is the focal point of his theory. McLuhan goes as far as to postulate that “specific content might have little effect on society. For example, it does not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming — the effect of television on society would be identical, and profound.” <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55550/neocortical_column.jpg" width="540" height="214" width_o="540" height_o="214" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55550/neocortical_column_o.jpg" data-mid="236308" border="0" align="left"/> In keeping with McLuhan’s logic, one could say that the brain is the medium and the mind is the message. In that respect it’s interesting that the internet not only provides us with universal access to information (and each other), but its non-linearity and capacity to generate massive connectivity is responsible for a rapid rewiring of our brains, which at the very minimum suggests a significant evolutionary shift. Research has shown that today’s internet generation is growing up with brains that are wired differently from those of the previous generation. The book Grown Up Digital substantiates that there is evidence of younger generations processing information and behaving differently because they have indeed developed brains that are functionally different from those of their parents. Their minds seem to be incredibly flexible, adaptable and multimedia savvy. According to the Learning Center at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory “they have developed hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential.” In his book Digital Game-Based Learning, Marc Prensky argues that digital immersion has literally rewired brains under 40, and the participatory culture enabling us to interact with both people and computers has expanded our mental abilities by allowing us to tap into a collective form of intelligence for “distributed cognition.” Evolutionary shifts in people’s consciousness have happened before of course. Just two weeks ago, scientists at the University College of London published a provocative study that puts a new twist on the long-standing belief that the hustle and bustle of cities is the most conducive environment for invention and innovation, whereby population density was the catalyst for the emergence of modern human behavior. This density, they argue, has led to a greater exchange of ideas and helped people develop, maintain and extend skills that led to technological and cultural innovation – not to mention a mental leap forward we now take for granted. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55550/constant_newconcept copy.jpg" width="540" height="365" width_o="540" height_o="365" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55550/constant_newconcept copy_o.jpg" data-mid="236305" border="0" align="left"/> The internet of course far exceeds the urban architecture in terms of its amazing density of connections, and by virtue of that fact alone its impact may serve as a key factor in bringing about some sort of Singularity. Even right now we’re experiencing a phenomenal upheaval forcing corporations, politicians and for that matter almost every established institution on the planet to adapt to the networked public sphere, which, incidentally, for the first time ever, makes it much more difficult for oppressive political regimes to squash such fundamental human accomplishments as free speech. All this we owe to software applications (i.e. Twitter or Facebook), which provide us with platforms that – to a much larger extent than their content – turned out to be revolutionary forces despite themselves, proving more than ever that the medium is the message. Ironically, my circle of friends has been consistently made up of on the one hand writers, artists and designers and on the other urbanist thinkers (architects) as well as software designers. In particular the latter have made me appreciate how the narratives of our time are most effectively shaped by those who are conversant with computer code. They, rather than my content creating friends, are the facilitators of the revolutionary paradigms artists and writers can only dream of. Their software development will ultimately set the stage for collective mental exercises like Polytopia, which once again serves as testament to McLuhan’s prophetic insight. Yet, regarding us content creators, our predicament is accurately expressed by Milan Kundera who writes that, “without the faith that expresses our Self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we cannot live or at least we cannot take life seriously.” Thus we will soldier on as we reflect on the tools that are rewiring our brains and take it upon ourselves to imbue recently acquired evolutionary conditions and fresh neural pathways with new theories of mind and enhanced concepts of Self. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene In our upcoming film The Terrestrials, made by a cast and crew of SpaceCollective members and dealing with, among many... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/Living-towards-the-Singularity http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/Living-towards-the-Singularity Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:55:49 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55117 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene As the intellectual contours of Polytopian existence are coming into focus in Wildcat’s recent writings, the condition he describes still leaves us without the more conducive sense of a “mind habitat” expressed in this pre-polytopian post. When SpaceCollective received an invitation to join the upcoming Singularity Summit in San Jose it made me think that several posts by Wildcat and other contributions to the site are exploring the existential implications of the same trajectory that will ultimately lead to the Singularity, albeit in a more engaging and creative way. Sort of like we represent the Humanities in conjunction with the Singularity's Science & Technology focus. I must admit that I was impressed with the recent announcement by Intel’s chief technology officer’s pledge to bring the Singularity within reach 4 decades from now. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55117/cern.jpg" width="540" height="334" width_o="540" height_o="334" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55117/cern_o.jpg" data-mid="234124" border="0" align="left"/> I'm not suggesting that Polytopia should be looking for similar validation (to my knowledge none of our contributors are engineers), but it wouldn’t hurt if our own discourse would somehow become more actionable, even though I'm still not quite sure how that can be accomplished. Obviously, continuing to think about the subject and articulating a more complete philosophical vision remains extremely valid, especially if it becomes a more collective exercise. But we should simultaneously capitalize on the creative bend of the SpaceCollective community and revive earlier expressions of interest in creating models for a new society. Coining the name Polytopia was a great start, and, as Alan Smith has proven with his post about Nationhood giving a visual identity to such an initiative has a lot of potential to effectively brand the proposal for a newly established Society of Mind and turn it into more of a perceptual reality. Writing manifestos, bylaws, etc. can be an exciting thing to do as well, and Spaceweaver's commitment to develop the concept of Polyethics will give the project critically important added substance. Practical contributions like notthisbody's post Towards a Polytopa are of course very welcome as well. Another potent aspect of the Polytopian position is that its principles can be considered revolutionary and could well be framed in terms of a movement. If people know it or not, they are already partaking in a revolution which may be largely invisible but is nevertheless a pivotal world-transforming event. However, I feel that our own acute sense of already being part of this all-encompassing transformation is one of the impediments that has prevented us as like-minded thinkers and creators to coordinate our efforts and give projects like Polytopia the critical mass needed to manifest in the outside world. Just think about it, the Singularity movement came about simply because sci-fi writer/academician Vernor Vinge established the initial concept, which was then embraced by the more practical thinker/inventor Ray Kurzweil and now Intel’s technology director. As a result a broadly recognized idea has taken root in the world built around little more than a catchy word, a succinct definition (the moment when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence) and Intel's co-founder Gordon E. Moore’s formulation of his now famous law. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55117/singularity.jpg" width="330" height="359" width_o="330" height_o="359" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55117/singularity_o.jpg" data-mid="234125" border="0" align="left"/> In light of the tremendous power of thought and creativity which has emerged on this site in a mere 8 months, I find it hard to believe that SpaceCollective wouldn’t be able to similarly push the envelope to the next level. I dare say that we are equally committed to pursue our own viable ideas, and on a creative level represent as versatile a force as anyone currently involved with the Singularity. Besides, Intel’s commitment as well as Moore’s law are working as much on our behalf as that of the Singularitarians. In fact, we’re in this together with them – as long as we continue to assert our own agenda and fulfill at least some of its potential to engage in the larger scheme of things. To be continued. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene As the intellectual contours of Polytopian existence are coming into focus in Wildcat’s recent writings, the condition he... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/Beyond-the-speed-of-thought http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/Beyond-the-speed-of-thought Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:39:05 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55095 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene An often recurring discussion on SpaceCollective concerns the limitations of language, typically meaning the written word, which seems most closely related to human thought. While other languages, like music or visuals, appeal more directly to our ‘intuitive’ capacities, written or verbal language, along with the abstraction and logical reasoning of mathematics, seems to appeal mostly to our ‘intellect’. According to the classic Myers-Briggs typological theory a relatively small percentage of people perceive the world intuitively. These individuals “tend to trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information (either remembered or discovered by seeking a wider context or pattern). They may be more interested in future possibilities. They tend to trust those flashes of insight that seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind. The meaning is in how the data relates to the pattern or theory.” <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55095/brainmap.jpg" width="540" height="396" width_o="540" height_o="396" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55095/brainmap_o.jpg" data-mid="234014" border="0" align="left"/> This sounds like a reasonable explanation why, even though most people on this site communicate their futuristic ideas through writing, they simultaneously have an ambiguous relationship to a language which subjects their reasoning to a simple rule-based syntax. Most people contributing to SC are thinkers, who are very much tuned into the above mentioned “possibilities” and “patterns,” and whatever else the brain processes in between the thinking and the words. As a rule, futurists have a strong intuitive side. Where others experience the world in concrete terms, they see reality as a scrim revealing the future potential of things, so they understandably want to adapt the modes of expression to fit their advanced paradigms. Yet we continue to be highly dependent on a linguistic tradition which is firmly tied to conventional processes of thought and, although frustrating at times, at this point it must still be considered the best available option to futher the discourse. Just think about how often we launch into a sentence, stringing along words with only a general sense of where they are leading us. Somehow the words keep coming out of our mouth (or word processor) trying to catch up to the speed of thought while the stream of consciousness moves its argument forwards as if it had been preconceived. Just like the improvisation of a jazz musician or a shaman speaking in tongues to conjure a vision. Look how Wildcat pushes language around and coins new phrases in his relentless attempts to hone his Polytopian vision, while expessing his frustration that “we are in dire need of a new kind of language, a language that may be able to bridge the immensity of the gap we have created between the perception of the world and the manner by which we describe the same world.” Also check out the writings of Meika and Xaos’ Montevideo posts , which shed light on future realities by elevating their words to a more evocative intuitive level. Or read Obvious’ post in which he observes that “language is revealed through text as the mode of our conscious experience – a truth which furthermore transforms the very capacities of the thoughts which think it. Once text, in its essence, is transmitted and elucidated via readership there is transformation “of the process of coming-into-being of the world.” Meanwhile Al wants SC to “create its own dictionary containing new words and new understandings of old words,” Folkert calls speech “a bottleneck for modern thinking and communication” and wants us to “come up with richer forms of idea-exchange,” and Carel suggests “non-symbolic, non-representative ways to communicate.” All of these appear to be the stirrings of the non-linear associative mind that mark the beginnings of a new typology. Lately, I’ve been doing a little exercise, trying to imagine some actual experiences if the brain were to seamlessly interface with machine intelligence. We have to assume that once technology turns inwards it will change our very way of being and profoundly transform our sense of Self because we will be known in much greater detail to our newly enhanced mind, from the minute data of our human genome to the collective awareness of our constantly updated life on this planet. This “invasive” brain/computer interface will deeply effect the experience of our surroundings, providing new layers of immersion and annotating every aspect of our reality, adding a whole new dimension to wherever we go and whoever we meet. In the streets we may know what lies behind the facades of every public building, giving us an instant impression of its tagged contents, and people will have devices, as they did in a Japanese experiment, transmitting and receiving each other’s personal profiles, alerting them to the presence of compatible others. In this ultra-serendipitous environment we will experience far more advanced forms of socializing which will infuse the world with a plethora of romantic opportunities that have eluded us so far. Access to immediately available data anywhere will bring the world alive, creating connections, synapses and links that will keep us connected to everyone and everything in our immediate surroundings and the world at large. As our minds will attain the non-linear associative powers that will do away with the static mold of analog information we will finally break through the speed barrier of thought. At this juncture, our brains may more frequently experience the precious moments when suddenly everything seems to be falling into place, like the occasional epiphanies we have today. In such a hyper-conscious world a majority of people may be able to achieve a form of machine-enhanced intuition bordering on telepathy, which in the days of Myers-Briggs used to be the exclusive domain of a privileged few. Finally, through the scrim of “reality,” the future potential of things will be revealed to all. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene An often recurring discussion on SpaceCollective concerns the limitations of language, typically meaning the written word,... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/Return-of-the-Renaissance-Man http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/Return-of-the-Renaissance-Man Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:05:37 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55077 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/nnj-abb92.jpg" width="287" height="393" width_o="287" height_o="393" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/nnj-abb92_o.jpg" data-mid="233948" border="0" align="left"/> If there is one thing I have enjoyed about SpaceCollectivesince its inception, it is the polymath nature of most of this site’s forward thinkers. Almost everyone here has a mixture of creative and intellectual ambitions, which more often than not covers philosophical and literary ground and a strong focus on art and design. In a way one could say that this a community of Generalists, similar to Wikipedia’s description of the Remaissance Man, aka as Homo Universalis: The term “universal man” or “man of the world” is used to describe a person who is well educated or who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields, based on the notion of Renaissance Humanism that “a man can do all things if he will.” A person of that era was expected to speak several languages, play a musical instrument, write poetry, and so on, thus fulfilling the Renaissance ideal. The idea of a universal education was pivotal to achieving polymath ability, hence the concept of the University, which at the time did not specialise in specific areas, but rather trained their students in a broad array of science, philosophy, theology and the arts. This universal education contributed hugely to their being able to comprehend the universe as it was understood at the time. This could have been the description of any of us here on SpaceCollective trying to comprehend the universe as it is understood in our time and beyond. A good representative of such a new-style Homo Universalis is NotThisBody, whose joint practice with his partner/girlfriend, covers: “film, video, photography, grapic design and media platform development.” They create multi-media works in English, French and Macedonian, not to mention computer code. NotThisBody does not “recognize borders between mediums” and they are “open to any and all who’d like to cooperate and co-create” with them. Since they spend most of their time as digital nomads, these collaborations could take place on the multiple online platforms where today’s Digital Renaissance is shaping up, or wherever their physical bodies may find themselves on this battle-worn planet as they are passing through, breaking down boundaries between people and cultural expressions wherever they go. During the Industrial Revolution the idea of the Homo Universalis was discredited because it was considered extremely difficult to genuinely acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of everything, and even more so to be proficient in several fields at the level of an expert. Not to mention to achieve excellence or recognition in multiple fields. As specialization became the norm at the world’s Universities, the word polymath began to take on a negative connotation, but the internet is rapidly bringing the era of the expert to a close by providing everyone universal access to all knowledge. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/knowledge-trees_small.jpg" width="498" height="351" width_o="498" height_o="351" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/knowledge-trees_small_o.jpg" data-mid="233950" border="0" align="left"/> Most of today’s educational institutions are still adhering to centuries old teaching models, bolstered by tenure and obligatory publications, wrought under the academic mandate to Publish or Perish. But as the dissemination of information is increasingly taking place online, knowledge creation is no longer the exclusive privilege of lecturing professors drawing from a canon that is frozen in time and often out of date. Instead, universal access to information allows for community-driven curricula which are forever updated by students interacting with an ever growing online repository of educational materials. None of this takes away from the necessity of brilliant teachers or the essential knowledge exchange between professionals and those who have signed on to learn from them. But it does mean a radically different dynamic between the institution and an increasingly participating student body whose contributions are transcending hierarchical, disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The mandate that may define tomorrow’s technologically integrated education might as well be, Participate or Perish, bringing the University in closer alignment again with the ideals of the original Renaissance Humanists. And these visionary minds are not the only ones from the distant past who established a precedent that is surprisingly relevant today. Recently I came across another historical inspiration that foreshadowed the potential of today’s internet revolution. Working on a concept for an online educational platform it came to my attention that at least three pillars of the current internet were informed by a century-old educational system conceived by Maria Montessori who hoped that her anti-authoritarian learning principles might ultimately bring about world peace. Born in 1870 in Italy, Maria would have been considered a true revolutionary in any time, leave alone hers. When she was 13 years old she attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dreams of becoming an engineer, and she was the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome’s Medical School, becoming the first female doctor in Italy. She ultimately became famous for her theory that education is not something that teachers do, but that learning comes naturally to humans. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/brinpage.jpg" width="257" height="285" width_o="257" height_o="285" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/brinpage_o.jpg" data-mid="233944" border="0" align="left"/>Being a product of the visionary lady’s ideas myself, it piqued my interest to find out that both Larry Page and Sergei Brin attributed Google’s success story to Maria Montessori. According to them their Montessori education taught them to be self directed and self starters, adding that their schooling taught them to think for themselves, giving them the freedom to pursue their own path, which would lead to the snowballing success of Google, which aims to provide the world with near universal access to all information known to man. This completely unexpected tribute to an often marginalized educational system struck me with the realization that the internet might indeed be looked at as a giant Montessori System with its respect for people’s individuality, innate curiosity and natural inclination to share which would become the underlying principle of Google’s PageRank, Amazon’s recommendation algorithm, and Wikipedia’s collaborative knowledge creation. In a Montessori school as well as on the web, students are given the appropriate tools to search the educational landscape without peer pressure or the need to compete. As a result of their firmly established autonomy they are much more inclined to contribute to the group, which in turn rewards them by sharing the outcome of everybody else’s inquiries, jointly increasing the community’s collective intelligence. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/spore2.jpg" width="350" height="263" width_o="350" height_o="263" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55077/spore2_o.jpg" data-mid="233946" border="0" align="left"/> Thus, on the eve of the First World War which would so violently expose humankind’s destructive tendencies, one woman’s prescience may have launched an educational model that helped set into motion one of the biggest mental revolutions to date. Who knows, one day her vision might help us realize the resolution she hoped for, as an exponentially growing number of unwitting digital disciples will finally foster peace on earth. Certainly, had she been around to see the fruits of her labor, she would have considered Google’s motto “Don’t Be Evil” a good start! Now it’s up to today’s educationalists to take notice and follow suit, or perish like every other institution harking back to the industrial revolution. So here, courtesy of Google and Wikipedia, is an invaluable message from the visionary pedagogue herself: “Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society”. Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene If there is one thing I have enjoyed about SpaceCollectivesince its inception, it is the polymath nature of most of this... http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/The-universe-will-fly-like-a-bird http://cargocollective.com/spacecollective/following/spacecollective/The-universe-will-fly-like-a-bird Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:07:53 +0000 SpaceCollective-alternate 55059 Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene In Spacewaver’s recent post about the Singularity University he mentions a discussion concerning the institution’s recent mission statement which, according to Jamais Cascio claims to be "preparing humanity for accelerating technological change," but is “spending a lot more time talking about nifty gadgets than about the connection between technology and society.” Spaceweaver considers Cascio’s opinion a possible “invitation to a discussion and exchange which is much in need,” and he believes that “the SpaceCollective can and perhaps should become a stage for such discussion.” <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55059/woods1_o.gif" width="540" height="319" width_o="540" height_o="319" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55059/woods1_o_o.gif" data-mid="233874" border="0" align="left"/> Here are my thoughts on the matter: I admire Ray Kurzweil’s advocacy of radical ideas. However, like so many scientists and tech mavens he has never been able to frame the essential humanistic components of his master plan in a compelling way. When you promote powerful notions of human transformation it obviously becomes important not to portray humanity as something that must be overcome. Therefore it would seem to be essential to include a Future Humanities department as part of the Singularity University's curriculum. I agree with Spaceweaver that the futurist thinkers on this site can contribute something of value to the Singularity University, and even to the curricula of the regular universities, like the ones SC worked with on several projects, since they conversely tend to ignore the subject of the future altogether. Spaceweaver himself is a perfect example of how the thinkers who contribute such valuable content to this site could play a role in filling this vacuum. In post after post he demonstrates a phenomenal grasp of the ethical and philosophical implications of the impending changes in the equilibrium of our culture. Likewise, the Polytopia project has become an impressive forum for the evolution of Future Mind, while SC’s mix of art, science and design represents precisely what is so painfully absent from most blogs dealing with topics like Nanotechnology, Transhumanism, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Check out KurzweilAI, for example, and note the banner ad for Ray & Terry’s Longevity Products, which rather looks like an advertisement for a Bed and Breakfast. The artless quality of the site makes one long for Folkert’s designs, Xaos’ Singularity-inspired poetics, Andy Gilmore’s art and the multi-media that makes the future represented by SpaceCollective so enticing. Unfortunately, we have to assume that Kurzweil’s X-Prize-, Google- and NASA-sponsored university, heady and scientific as it will undoubtedly become, will be lacking some of the emotional and aesthetic experiences we aspire to. In all likelihood, little attention will be paid to the fact that the future could actually be a sexy and stimulating place and there will be a deficit of the magic many of us here associate with technology. Nor will there be many young faces gracing the institute’s vaunted halls, due to its prohibitive tuition. I can’t help but imagine the place as an ivied, corporate institute, rather than a desirable haven for techno-optimism. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55059/woods6_o.gif" width="300" height="410" width_o="300" height_o="410" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/6018/55059/woods6_o_o.gif" data-mid="233875" border="0" align="left"/> Many of us have been influenced by Eric Drexler’s brilliant introduction to nano technology, Engines of Creation, and I read The Singularity is Near from cover to cover. I was inspired by Vernor Vinge’s novel True Names and Timothy Leary’s plans to cryonically preserve his molecular framework for future resurrection as well as Hans Moravec’s dream of taking science to the edge where Humanity becomes Trans-Human. Being foremost a storyteller I would dream up future scenarios informed by the ideas of these Wizened Elders of Futurism that were populated by human characters people could identify with. These science-fact based stories became exciting exercises in creating entirely new worlds based on new potentials and rules, even though most of them stood little chance to become movies because the film industry has a longstanding policy to only fund dystopian narratives (check out this post on the subject). In response to that dismal state of affairs I’m now finishing up a SciFi documentary about the late Timothy Leary, my favorite ‘mad scientist,’ promoting the evolution of intelligence by whatever means possible. Leary’s main challenge in life was not to let dystopia’s henchmen – who chased him across the globe and kept him in jail for years – succeed at turning his life into a cautionary tale. As a result, his story is one of the most spectacular object lessons in optimism, defiant at every turn and as prescient as only the best futurists manage to be. It just so happens that Leary makes a number of posthumous appearances in Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, one of which is a fictional conversation with a character called Molly2004, who tries to figure out what will separate future humans from “bacteria who would talk and think” once we will be “saturating the universe with our intelligence.” Someone by the name of George2048 responds, “Indeed, Molly, that is fundamentally what the Singularity is all about. The Singularity is the sweetest music, the deepest art, the most beautiful mathematics…” “I’m still trying to envision what the universe will be doing,” Molly insists, whereupon Timothy Leary elucidates that “the universe will be flying like a bird…” No matter my critical remarks in this post, Ray Kurzweil deserves our highest admiration for encouraging so many people to take a giant leap into a future that not so long ago would have been considered unthinkable. Only someone willing to play the part of ‘straight man’ could have possibly succeeded at rallying the support which should make the Singularity a reality, by which time he may finally be able to transcend his cheerleader role. After all, by then everything will have changed. As Xaos put it in his first SpaceCollective post: The amazing thing about the singularity, the Story of the singularity that is, is the way it affects us. When projecting it on the line of our event horizon, the singularity is a story that brings us into deconstruction and moves us into composing ourselves anew. The human today lives in a radical time, actually an extremely radical time; the future is rushing at us, proposing for the first time the idea and reality of a better platform, distinctively different from the imperfect outcome of natural selection. It is the beginning of an accelerating change that is starting to gain a confident and attractive position, projecting the human over an open horizon. Changing the very meaning of what, who and how a human is. So Mr. Kurzweil, just to let you know, we are waiting for your call. In the meantime we’d appreciate a courtesy discount on your school’s tuition or perhaps even a few scholarships as a token for our relentless promotion of your cause. P.S. In an excellent comment by EINitro, he includes a great quote by RISD President John Maeda: Amidst the attention given to the sciences as how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered ‘useless,’ will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. — Images via Lebbeus Woods Posted at SpaceCollective.org by Rene In Spacewaver’s recent post about the Singularity University he mentions a discussion concerning the institution’s...